Posts Tagged ‘OMSI’

Share this:

There are more wonderful games being released on PC each month than ever before. In such a time of plenty, it’s important that you spend your time as wisely as possible. Thankfully, we’re here to help. What follows are our picks for the best PC games ever made. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

(Next week in The Flare Path: How to Draw a PMD-6 Anti-Personnel Mine)

Going by the number of sketches arriving in the FP inbox at the moment, this column’s recent foray into art tuition is going down extremely well. For every RPS reader keen to spend their Friday lunch hour reading about upcoming quadruplex transport sims, imminent Seven Years War strategy offerings, ill-conceived wargame patches, and my ongoing World of Warships dalliance, it seems there are three or four hungry for bite-sized drawing lessons. I’d make some comment about the pencil being mightier than the sword/Schmeisser if I wasn’t aware of the experiments conducted in the late 1940s by the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment that proved the exact opposite. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

Ready to discover once-and-for-all whether X-Plane is better than FSX? Whether Falcon 4.0 is better than Milk Float Simulator 2012? Ready to read the word ‘realism’ 46 times in a single hour, and spit feathers on discovering that the sim that caused got you through your divorce has been cruelly cold-shouldered by an idiot with a bus fetish and a sci-fi blindspot the size of the Crab Nebula? You are? Splendid. You’re in the right place.

Share this:

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

As if being a bus simulator wasn’t an easy enough joke, OMSI goes further by being about a particular type of bus at a very particular time and place: divided Berlin during the 1980s. How strange, how funny, who would want to play this?

Everyone should want to play this. OMSI is rich, soulful, a mental balm, a sensory delight, and one of my favourite games.

Share this:

Flare Path War Hero #31. Major Leonard Allday. A trained watchmaker and keen amateur ornithologist, Allday joined SOE in August 1940, and spent much of the war working on a series of top-secret bird and bat-based schemes. While his carrier pigeon munitions and ‘Pocket Pipistrelle’ personal sonar never progressed beyond the testing stage, Project Pantheon – a plan to disrupt the Axis war effort using thousands of specially trained magpies – was implemented. Trained to steal keys, nuts, bolts, and small machine parts, Allday’s corvids were delivered in batches of 24 by lone low-flying Blenheims (later, Mosquitos). By April 1945, over 4000 birds had been dropped behind enemy lines. While the overall impact of Project Pantheon is difficult to assess, evidence gathered after the war by SOE historian G. M. Birkin indicates that magpie mischief seriously damaged production in several key industries and may have delayed the introduction of the formidable Me 262 fighter by up to six months. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

Both the OMSI and the OMSI 2 manual begin with the same Goethe quote. In 2011 “Such a work is never actually finished – one must simply declare it to be finished once one has done as much as possible given the time and circumstances.” felt like a dangled promise… a hint of riches yet to come. In 2014, in the light of the NG272-length bug list currently dominating my play notes, it feels like a whispered apology… acknowledgement that the follow-up to one of the finest driving games of recent years was bustled out of the door before it was good and ready. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

OMSI 2 has just been released and the Steam page contains my favourite feature description of all time:

Relive the change taking place in Spandau between 1986 and 1994! OMSI 2 now replicates the exciting years following the German reunification and all the innovations and route expansions (line 137 to Falkensee) that came along with it.

The exciement and dramatic changes of German reunification recreated via transport developments, timetable changes and route expansions. I’ve been waiting for this transport simulation period piece to come out ever since I first read Tim Stone’s words about the first in the series. His diary is still one of my favourite pieces of writing on the internet.

Share this:

The anticipators are myriad. They mill beside the stops at Rathaus, Spandau scrutinising distant double-deckers, and scowling at timepieces. They sigh, they pace, they ignore precipitation, but most of all they wait. They wait, as they’ve waited this past two years, for the sequel to one of The Five Great Simulations. OMSI 2 is close – so close you can almost hear the trill of its IBIS and smell the liquorice of its exhaust. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

I realise this could cause resentment, but it has to be said. Readers #52, #298, and #611, of all the people that regularly peruse this column, you are definitely my favourites. #298, that thing you do with your bottom lip when you’re reading pieces about unexpected OMSI add-ons. Adorable! #611, the way you turn down the radio and shush Minter, your foul-mouthed minah bird, before watching vids on monumental Outerra architecture. Have you any idea how charming that is? And #52… wise, loyal, long-suffering 52, you’re my Blackburn Roc. No-one but you reads every word of these idiotic intros week in, week out. No-one else nods enthusiastically when I brazenly claim Perfect Distance was last year’s most interesting wargame.

Share this:

The Flare Path turns one this week. Here in the UK that means it can legally get its navel pierced, buy wine gums, point at clouds, and read Knut Hamsun on public transport. To commemorate the occasion there’ll be no game newscasts or inscrutable intros today. The entire column will be given over to quizzes. Dozing adorably beyond the jump are five bushy-tailed Foxers, each with a rather special prize tied to its brush. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

Tomorrow morning at daybreak, the Flare Path is being executed for treason. His nosey neighbour, Mr Geoff Himmler, spotted him placing 2p coins on the railway line at the bottom of the garden, and informed the authorities. The next thing FP knew, he was sat in a dingy cell in the Tower of London with nothing but a laptop, a tin of alphabetti spaghetti, and a Dangerous Waters manual for company. After reading the alphabetti spaghetti and eating the Dangerous Waters manual, the condemned man has decided to spend his final hours sharing Achtung Panzer tips and disseminating news of upcoming train, bus, and jet sims.

Share this:

In a week when the misguided lexicographers behind Collins Dictionary announced that ‘obsolete’ terms such as ‘aerodrome’, ‘charabanc’, and ‘cyclogyro‘ would not appear in the 2011 edition of their word guide, the obvious focus for Flare Path is inter-war flight sim Pavilioned In Splendour and 1920s bus-driving/matchmaking game Bognor or Bust!

Unfortunately, both of these titles are being developed by notorious vapourware merchants My Over-Active Imagination Soft, so it’s probably best we make do instead with talk of Berlin bus opus OMSI, fast-approaching Falklands jet sim Jet Thunder, and John Tiller’s fresh-off-the-LCU Squad Battles: Falklands.

Share this:

Oh, I know! A new bus simulator game has been announced by Aerosoft. It will be published in “early 2011” for the bargain price of €29.99 You need to look at the screenshots here. Also, it uses TrackIR head tracking, if you have that fancy stuff: “TrackIR by NaturalPoint now offers the complete freedom of movement in the OMSI cockpit too and intuitively helps checking the mirrors, operating the dashboard switches and reading the instruments.”